ANALYSIS | Fears over a strain of H5N1 bird flu virus that could be turned into a deadly biological weapon have led scientists to delay publishing scientific findings. The World Health Organization stated in a press release that 60 percent of all humans who have been infected with the naturally occurring avian influenza virus have died.
Two independent laboratory teams, one in The Netherlands and the other in the United States, created a more virulent strain that is more easily transmissible in humans. Scientific journals, funders of the research and countries that supplied the viruses agreed at a meeting in Geneva to delay publishing how the teams converted a naturally-occurring virus into a possible biological weapon.
Issues such as safety and security in the event of a bioterrorism attack were voiced at the meeting. Should the mutated virus somehow be recreated, escape into the public domain or even fall into the wrong hands, a worldwide catastrophe could ensue if billions of people die from the infection.
The Washington Post reports this particular naturally occurring strain was first discovered in Hong Kong in 1997. The bird flu has been known to infected 600 people, killing over half of them. Most of those cases were Asia. In general, it is hard for humans to catch this virus as it must mutate to be able to grow inside human hosts.
The two teams discovered a few mutations that could allow the H5N1 virus to spread like normal influenza through human populations. The difficulty is that the strain was just as deadly in the cases of those who caught the disease due to overexposure to chickens and poultry in Asia.
Reuters states the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity wants the scientific work censored. U.S. officials want more work to be done on the security end of things.
The Spanish flu outbreak of 1918-1919 killed an estimated 40 million people worldwide. With higher populations and more people living closer together, a new outbreak of a deadly flu strain could prove difficult to stop. Science Daily reports a vaccine was developed in late 2010. Yet it only works in people who have gotten the vaccine.
The doomsday scenario may or may not happen. Yet a new biological terrorist weapon is a very real fear. The world lived in fear of atomic annihilation from the 1940s to the early 1990s when the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in the Cold War as they stockpiled nuclear weapons.
Now the battle is on again between science and power. This time, the weapon is a microscopic virus and not a huge nuclear bomb.